Strange Animals in Spandex

The Silver Age of comics included innovations in dynamism, characterization, and even the fundamental editorial model underlying superhero comics, such changes providing much of what would constitute the comics canon in later years; however, some elements, such as the proliferation of super-powered, caped, and even masked animals, represented a strange period aberration that fortunately hasn't survived.

Ace the Bat-Hound

Ace the Bat-Hound, an obscure footnote from a departed era, has grown in celebrity in the generation or so since he made his brief appearance in a Batman story. Ace didn't catch on during his brief moment in the Batman spotlight, but the passage of time has magnified his significance, and in subsequent decades he has become became something of a poster child for the Silver Age comics of the Absurd.

In Batman #92 (or thereabouts, sometime in 1955), Batman found a drowning dog. He took this unlucky specimen and put him to use fighting crime. Unfortunately, Ace bore a distinctive mark on his forehead. This called for concealment. So - and here a serious-minded reader may begin to squirm in his chair - Batman equipped the dog with a mask in order to protect the dog's secret identity.

In few places do we see such a pure instance of the secret identity fetishism of the Silver Age as this. No mere taming of one's disbelief would suffice to allow a reader to consider that a dog would willingly wear an identity-concealing hood, and that, furthermore, said contrivance would actually conceal the dog's identity. Natural skepticism would shred the concept unless a reader so dulled his natural tendency to scoff unto the point of destroying it altogether in the face of the notion that a dog could maintain a secret identity with a little cloth mask.

Those who recognize the concept "Ace, the Bat-Hound" understand all of this; and thus we have a ready made joke (albeit based on a highly specialized cultural referent) whenever anyone chooses to mention him.

Comet the Super-Horse

Superman, after about twenty years in print, began to accrete a family. At the dawn of the sixties, after a tryout as a throwaway character in an earlier story, Supergirl began appearing in DC stories and would play the role of Superman's cousin and protege until DC cleaned house of commercially unsuccessful characters at key points during Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Through Supergirl stories, readers garnered the fringe benefit of truly strange concepts like Comet the Super-Horse. Comet, as it turned out, had some bizarre variant of the curse of the werewolf. He had begun as an extraterrestrial of convincingly humanoid form, cursed with conversion into an equine form that once only involved a centaurlike state, then came to involve a full conversion into a white horse. However, this curse tied closely into the presence of visible comets in the sky - hence, the name "Comet" - and Comet would resume his human form during the passing of the occasional bit of debris from the Oort cloud.

Comet, therefore, enjoyed a function as sometime pet of Supergirl and sometime beau. That DC even allowed something like a superheroine with a horse for a boyfriend, however Weisinger, et al, chose to convolute it with peculiar tales of changing form and passing comets, suggests that someone in the industry may have enjoyed planting absurdist sexual subtext in superhero comics. Perhaps things like this initially set off Dr. Frederick Wertham in his crusade to expurgate the content of popular comics.

Streaky the Super-Cat

Streaky, like Comet, did not enjoy a Kryptonian heritage. Even as the stable of super-pets began to exceed the boundaries of even a plausibility that accepted things like Kryptonian supermen, so too did the plot device and Superman weakness Kryptonite begin to expand into other forms. Old-school Superman readers might recall the essential forms of Kryptonite, including green (which killed), red (which caused unpredictable effects), white (which defoliated and destroyed disease), jewel (which increased telepathic ability), blue (which killed Bizarros), and gold (which permanently stripped Kryptonians of their powers). However, this stable of peculiar colored rocks also included some five or six variants of green Kryptonite, including "Kryptonite-X," which gave super-powers to terrestrial creatures.

Streaky the cat benefited from an exposure to the power-inducing Kryptonite and came to appear in Supergirl stories as Streaky the Super-Cat, apparently in service to the premise that Kryptonians would not interest themselves in ordinary terrestrial beasts as companions, or simply because something in the sixties told Mort Weisinger and company that Superman needed a stable of bizarre creatures and relatives to create a small Kryptonian and super-powered community to offset the feeling of isolation that characterized many Wayne Boring-era Superman stories.

Beppo the Super-Monkey

DC in the sixties had some kind of fixation on monkeys and apes. From Angel and the Ape, to Flash villain Gorilla Grodd, to a number of stories where giant apes either appeared for heroes to fight or where heroes spontaneously transformed into various simian forms. In such a context, Beppo the Super-Monkey makes considerable sense even without the need to investigate his origins.

However, for the sake of providing some kind of information to sustain the cultural canon of comics triviata, we may observe here that Beppo enjoyed the same Kryptonian heritage as Superman and Supergirl. Jor-El, it seems, had run animal tests on his rocket system prior to committing his firstborn to his rocket design; and he had sent Beppo, who sometimes seemed like a monkey (a simian with a tail) and sometimes like a chimpanzee (a tailless great ape with much more in common with humans than monkeys share). Given that, for kids (and many adults), the distinctions between monkeys and apes remain unclear, we can forgive DC's occasional confusion of the details of conventional taxonomy.

Krypto and the SCPA

As Superman comics delved more into his Kryptonian origins in the Wayne Boring era of the mid-1950s, these stories got more and more into the details of the life of Jor-El and Lara, Superman's parents. To some extent, these stories also tended to detail some of Superman's infancy, inconsistently shifting his age at the time of his escape from the dying home world. In some stories, the young Kal-El even had a canine companion. In a tale not too different from that describing the rocket testing that sent Beppo the Super-Monkey to earth, another tale had Jor-El sending a rocket containing Kal-El's pet Krypto into space, where, by whatever indirect route, said canine came to arrive on earth some years later than his erstwhile master.

Krypto didn't push the envelope of absurd overachievement by himself; that had to wait until he acquired his own supporting cast. As Superman's and Superboy's companion, he didn't do too much to drag stories from "couldn't happen" into "so ridiculous it embarasses the reader or helps incline him to psychosis." One might, after accepting the premise of Kryptonian superpowers at all, figure the least likely thing about Krypto centered around that animal's good behavior. The details of attempting to housebreak such an animal - recalling that it would enjoy the same limitless power as attached to his human owner - would make for a grotesque sequel to Larry Niven's essay "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex."

A reader with some small self-consciousness about what might happen if someone caught him reading a Superman or Superboy with Krypto in it might not shudder too much in fear from the basic premise. However, a short-lived feature that paralleled Superboy's role in the Legion of Super-Heroes did present a problematic use of the fictional dog in a way that would elicit either shame or hilarity in a reader caught ingesting such tales.

Krypto definitely crossed the line into the Land of Weird by participating in the handful of stories that depicted the Space Canine Patrol Agency. If you missed this the first time around, consider it a rare bit of luck.

The SCPA stories paralleled Superboy's relationship with the Legion of Super-Heroes. Krypto, in this context, served as a member of a body of variously super-powered dogs, presumably from a number of worlds. This assemblage of super-dogs fought crime (as a household pet with sentience and other incredible abilities might see it) and performed some established LSH rites like the auditioning of new talent.

We have plenty to annoy the skeptical and dement the rational here. Begin with the premise of a roomful of talking - and occasionally squabbling - dogs, and place them not in their native genre (funny animal comics) but in the superhero comic, a form with different conventions that tend to exclude a ubiquity of sentient beasts. That conceit suffices to make such a piece at best someone's secret shame of comics, hidden away like some tastelessly lurid pinup magazine. But this piece did not fall back on its ridiculous central concept; it defied complacency by moving ever forward into the ludicrous lands it saw beyond the horizon.

Consider, for instance, that Krypto, in this context, felt the need to maintain a secret identity (personally I have never met a dog that maintained or needed a secret identity, but I recognize that this may result from a provinciality on my own part). If Ace the Bat-Hound in his black mask strikes a reader as stupid - nay, beyond stupid and well into the domain of perverse - what can we make of Krypto concealing his identity with a pair of glasses? We have absurdity that cascades here: First, a dog with seemingly human awareness; second, a dog that wears a red cape; third, a dog that flies; fourth, a dog that attaches to an organization of similarly gifted canines; fourth, a dog that feels a need to maintain adouble life; fifth, a dog that actually creates and performs an alternate persona; sixth, a dog that wears glasses for any reason; and seventh, a dog who, by the wearing of glasses, somehow looks different enough that no one recognizes him.

To move so far from "couldn't happen" into the more dangerous provinces of "please don't let it happen" requires a lot of comics readers. Unless you richly enjoy the affront to your powers of disbelief, such stories will do little for you. That some fans so warmly regard pieces of such relentless absurdity that they choose to create web pages in their honor attests much to the human contempt for the rational, a contempt that some minds, with vision, raise to the level of a virtue.